What Type of Customer Are You?

Are you a dog lover? Do you like to relax with Netflix on a Friday night? Our personalities and preferences shape how we interact with the world – everything from our chosen career path to what sports we play. It drives our moods and our behaviors and can dictate how we interact with family, friends, and even our favorite brands.

With the holiday shopping season quickly approaching, we thought it would be fun to understand how our personality and daily behaviors impact how we approach customer service engagement. Surveying over 1,000 US consumers, we found that most of us fall into one of four distinct (and colorful) personas.

So, who are we at heart?

DIYers: As the name may suggest, DIYers always try to fix any problems themselves before contacting customer support. This is where most of us fall. Not surprising with the rise of today’s ‘always-on’ culture, wealth of information at our fingertips (think of the number of YouTube help videos out there) and popularity of the do-it-yourself movement (#nailedit). Brands looking to win over this group should have easy and intuitive self-service options to help this collection of consumers shine!

Social Butterflies: This group doesn’t mind contacting customer service and in fact sometimes enjoy the conversation, but when they don’t get the desired outcome, they will bring their efforts to the media. Social media that is. Brands looking to win this group over need to be able to communicate with them through whatever channel they desire, including the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Flame-O-Grammars: This is a small, but often noisy group. They have short fuses and do not hesitate to reach out to customer support by any means available. Most often, when we are made aware of a negative customer service interaction it’s because a Flame-O-Grammer was loud and proud about their dissatisfaction.

Suffers-in-Silence: This is the smallest group in our survey. These folks tend to just deal with whatever situation they are in and would rather ignore the problem than put the energy into fixing it. Suffers are more likely to consider the case closed and move on than continue to contact customer support. On the off chance they do reach out for help, this group will likely be wowed by an exceptionally easy customer experience. Sufferers no more!

Our personalities showed similarities when it comes to customer service interactions, but also how many (seemingly random) traits and preferences from our everyday lives color our behaviors.

It’s interesting to see that what makes us unique also ties us together. For brands designing customer service engagement programs, its valuable to keep in mind the fact that customers are not so dissimilar. While we may approach customer engagements differently most of us want the same thing – easy, personalized and fast service.